The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 marked the start of a growing awareness of climate change, its global repercussions and a shared political desire to limit the risks associated with it. This has led to the development of frameworks for scientific consultation such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the promotion of the precautionary principle and the formulation of programmes like the Kyoto Protocol, whose arrangements include a carbon emissions market. Human activities in various domains (industry, agriculture, livestock rearing, transport and so on) contribute to the production of greenhouse gases. Giri (1989: 161)...

The three key elements in the concept of adaptation to climate change at the local level are:

awareness of the impact of climate change on livelihoods and production systems;

understanding the extent of its effects;

the existence of endogenous adaptation strategies.

First, there is a growing awareness that the climate is changing and that this has a perceptible effect on local livelihoods and production systems. The adaptation strategies adopted reflect the particular history of each community. From this perspective, mobility is reinvented as a strategy for adaptation to climate change and used in conjunction with existing strategies.

It can be...

Like many francophone African countries, Senegal faced a number of major challenges when it became independent in 1960. The first was building a nation-state despite the various institutional crises that threatened the political and social stability of the country in the early days of independence.⁴ These troubled times were followed by a long period of political stability, until the rise of irredentism in the Casamance in the early 1980s.

Building a State raises the difficult question of governance in general, and natural resource governance in particular, as this largely determines the way that power is distributed and managed at the...

It is assumed that certain phenomena observed in the study sites — such as declining, irregular and erratic rainfall, changing temperature gradients and floods — are associated with climate change. All these phenomena increase the vulnerability of people who lack the ability to predict them or the resources to deal with them.

As its name suggests, the groundnut basin has long been the principal area for producing groundnuts, a cash crop that has been pivotal to the Senegalese economy. In recent decades this area has also been affected by deteriorating climatic conditions that have disrupted local livelihoods and led to...

Local economies in Sahelian countries have always been largely agrarian, and therefore susceptible to climatic hazards. History shows that the demographic disruptions and economic crises they have undergone are invariably associated with climatic phenomena like drought. Local people have also always had the capacity to adapt to these adverse situations and mitigate the effects that climatic hazards have on their daily lives. Mobility has emerged as a key element of local strategies for adapting to changing living conditions. In his work Une histoire des famines au Sahel: Etude des grandes crises alimentaires (XIXe- XXe siècles), Gado (1993) notes that leaving...

This analysis shows that climate change is exacerbating vulnerabilities that have certainly existed for a long time, but which have become more complex and extensive, and consequently require adaptation strategies that are largely developed at the global level but implemented at the local level.

Putting these strategies into practice entails taking account of local inter-relationships, specificities and perceptions. Climate change is usually seen as a calamity, rather than an opportunity that can be seized. In this respect, we also need to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts that it has had on people’s lives, the sustainability of their adaptation...